PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Time was up, not 10 minutes into the visit. The social worker went to pull the 3-year-old orphan out of the arms of the woman he calls “Momma.” The boy turned his face and dug his hands into her clothes. He kicked. He screamed as they carried him away.
Tamara Palinka covered her mouth to hold back the sobs. The 37-year-old Canadian volunteer aid worker did not know when — or if — she would get another glimpse of the child she was desperately trying to adopt.
International adoption has always been a sensitive subject in Haiti, a reminder that the country is too poor to care for its own.
After January’s quake, the Haitian government effectively slammed the door shut on most adoptions altogether. With no foster-care system and virtually no domestic adoption in Haiti, untold numbers of children orphaned by the quake — like the 3-year-old known as Sonson — face lifetimes inside an institution.
The crackdown on adoption came in response to two incidents. First, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell flew 53 children from a destroyed orphanage run by two Pittsburgh sisters back to the U.S., after a tense standoff with officials at the Haiti airport. Then a group of U.S. missionaries tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the country without papers, claiming they were orphans when in fact all had at least one living parent.
Infuriated, the Haitian government announced that all children leaving the country would need the signature of Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. Since then, the government has relented somewhat, but it still allows only the adoption of children orphaned before the quake or those relinquished by their parents in the presence of a judge.
“The sad part is that because of a few people’s mistakes, children that could find a good home and are waiting for a home will now have to suffer for years — and may never get a home at all,” said Miriam Frederick, founder of the New Life Childrens Home orphanage.
At another orphanage, Sonson sits apart from the other children. He stares at the floor.
“Who is your momma?” asks an orphanage worker.
“Mara,” he whispers.
“Do you miss her?” He nods.
In the month since they were separated, Palinka has seen him twice more. Each time she finds him diminished. “He looks smaller. He’s no longer making eye contact,” she said.
He cannot be declared an orphan for at least six months, to give his family a chance to reclaim him if they are alive. After that, he enters the bureaucratic labyrinth of Haiti’s adoption limbo.
Even before the earthquake, the waiting time for the roughly 300 Haitian children adopted each year into U.S. households was two to three years. So even if the government accepts Palinka’s application, 3-year-old Sonson will be waiting for about as long as he has been alive.
